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Mission: Design a robust
system that allows a user to stream live data to hundreds of others
without redundant servers or expensive high-bandwidth connections.

The
FlightPath idea is simple. Use a peer-to-peer approach to stream live
content. The broadcaster need only send each part of the stream to a
subset of peers. Peers then share the stream parts with each other,
adding redundancy and bandwidth to the overall system without any cost
to the broadcaster. Each peer reconstructs the stream after a small
delay and feeds the reconstructed stream to the user's media player.

The
FlightPath technology is not so simple. As we've already seen in
peer-to-peer file-sharing applications, users do not like to share.
Such selfishness hurts the system, and so the FlightPath technology
introduces new mechanisms to encourage cooperation among peers,
mechanisms that allow peers to trade stream packets in exchange for
other stream packets. You can read about the details of our mechanisms
in our published papers.

brought to you by the Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research at UT Austin